Bulgaria bomb blast: Iran accuses Israel of killing its own citizens

Iran's UN envoy says it was Israel who plotted and staged the Bulgarian bus attack, buffing off allegations his country was behind the tragedy.

The suicide bomb attack on a bus in the Bulgarian city of Burgas on July 18 killed five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver and injured over 30 more.Israel was quick to point the finger at Iran, accusing Tehran and its “Hezbollah proxy” of staging the bombing. "It's amazing that just a few minutes after the terrorist attack, Israeli officials announced that Iran was behind it," Iran's UN Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee told in a UN Security Council debate on the Middle East on Wednesday. "We have never and will not engage in such a despicable attempt on innocent people.""Such a terrorist operation could only be planned and carried out by the same regime whose short history is full of state terrorism operations and assassinations, aimed at implicating others for narrow political gains," added Khazaee. "I could provide … many examples showing that this regime killed its own citizens and innocent Jewish people during the last couple of decades.”Israel's deputy UN ambassador Haim Waxman called the accusation by Iranian Ambassador "Appalling, but not surprising from the same government that says the 9/11 attack was a conspiracy theory and denies the Holocaust."Iran has repeatedly blamed Mossad-trained terrorists for assassinations of the country’s top nuclear scientists and attacks on its nuclear research sites.